I assume the changes to encourage people not to dash through the operations to earn more XP included the obnoxious increase in swarms and spore mines. I have seen spore mine clusters literally spawn into existence behind a squad mate and instakill them. Not to mention spore clouds now spread out making them difficult to target in a dog pile forcing you to roll around until you die. Additionally the parry mechanic changes have sort of exasperated the issue. It feels like the invulnerability window has been reduced to nothing on pistol strikes making them useless during a swarm as the whip guys basically constantly knock you out of strikes causing you to eat huge amounts of damage.

It is all very unfortunate because it resulted in my squad mates not wanting to play anymore. I have been trying to play solo but with these changes, given the inability to select alt classes as your AI squad (like verm), AI refusing to attack stuff, and the inability to earn armory data till you can clear a higher difficulty with the previous tier's weapons I am starting to get the urge to move on to something else.

I love the potential for this game but unfortunately the industry would rather tune and balance to elite players forcing out anyone else. This is a strange mindset but you see it everywhere. Force out the casual players to build a game designed only for the small percentage of elite players. Big business relies soo much on analytics that they forget how change affects the play experience. There are so many games to play these days that little blunders can cause people to bounce off a game fast and move on which sucks especially for groups that have regular co-op nights.

I agree. I think the spore mines are a cool concept that were poorly executed. In general the things I see ATM that make the game feel sloppy and poorly balanced/broken are:

- In operations like Inferno Neurothropes will spawn in the abandoned facility (in the area with the elevator) with no ammo cache. The elevator blocks you from interacting with it while the Neurothrope is out. This has been a recent problem because the ammo cache hasn't been spawning there and if the squad is out of ammo or runs out of ammo you basically have to wipe. There is no way to progress. You can't run and there is no way to fight the *thropes without ammo.

- Spore mine clouds spawning excessively and instantly while your back is turned catching players for a quick, inescapable death. When playing solo with AI this is a wipe.

- Creatures spawning into areas you have just cleared and insta calling for backup and there is nothing you can do as they are too far away to ever get to in time to stop the call. It seems like the director moves the enemies into the next area if you force the progression as there is always a horde waiting that is larger than the usual hordes.

- Creatures spawning and calling for backup out of bounds where there is no way to reach or prevent the call.

- Creatures doing the red unblockable attacks all at once perfectly timed to stop your pistol strike (feels deliberate and broken).

- The Teleporting guys are all sorts of broken. They have been teleporting out of their red stun phase before you can execute. I had one teleport out after I had started the execution animation which seems like a bug. Maybe this was lag related?

- Auto aim no longer seems to work on spore mines nor the green bramble things Xenos coat the ground with making them difficult for console gamers to clear (ie: you basically just ignore them as it isn't worth eating ammo trying to target the tiny hidden seed in the center of a bramble)

- The volume of the green bramble things that xenos coat the area with. They literally coat the ground for yards at a time and will even surround themselves with bramble. Meltas AOE doesn't seem to clear them unless you literally target them.

- Generally things spawning when you have no ammo or have no way to replenish ammo forcing you to run. This was fine before the bonus XP addition but really isn't very cool after the bonus addition. Sure you can melee your way through things but after all of the horrendous parry and pistol strike nerfs melee isn't worth the risk. It seems much much harder (especially with certain classes like Heavy) to regain armor with the state of the pistol strike changes. Getting knocked out of a pistol strike almost constantly makes it basically useless and makes it much harder to regain armor resulting in faster and more frequent deaths. When playing solo this is a wipe especially in the harder difficulties.

- Zoanthrope green lasers tracking you and changing direction as you roll to avoid. This is fine if the xenos weren't both targeting the same person. If you get caught by the first blast you stun lock and have to eat the follow up blasts. At higher difficulties this is instadeath. When playing solo this is a wipe and waste of player's time.

- Zoanthropes (shield bros) should have line of sight to be able to shield one another. Countless times these damn enemies will be separated by geometry making them difficult to fight. One may be in one tunnel and the other may be in a completely different room or tunnel that is difficult to get to when there is a major swarm. At higher difficulties they change shields so frequently that they aren't even worth fighting solo when one is off somewhere in a different room or tunnel.

Ok I am officially done with SM2 for awhile.

I just had a run where the director was hell bent on forcing a wipe.

Average difficulty, solo.

Non stop massive waves to the point where I was wading through a swarm the entire operation. 3 sets of shield bros, Neurothrope 3 minutes into the game, instakilled by a ravener that popped out the ground and attached to me as I was about to interact with the event start terminal and wouldn't let go till I was dead. AI squad mates did nothing.

You devs like numbers? Here are some number on Average for you. I want to believe this game has potential and I love the universe but your game is broken and I'm done. I'll be back in a year if you decide to make this title worth playing again.

Yeah my squad mates stopped playing after the melee patch so I have been going it alone. I have logged a ton of hours into the game as Heavy is the 3rd class I started working on (vanguard, bulwark are the others). I know the game wasn't intended for solo play but they added it so they should support it and not just throw it in there to try to shore up sales numbers.

Difficulty spikes have been introduced by previous patches and it did stop us from playing them as well. This patch feels particularly bad for the reasons above.

Personally, I don't like gaming with random people I don't know. I am old and online gaming is pretty toxic and it is not like random teams are much better than bots if you don't participate in voice chat. Folks just wander around doing their own thing from my experience. So just don't add solo play at all if it wasn't intentional or supported.

When I play Vermintide 2 (which we started back up after the new content drop) I can see a desire to support all players single or squad.

Solo

1. Bots are actually fairly competent without feeling like they clear out specials before they appear.

2. You can prioritize which classes will be your bots and it actually uses your leveled up classes which encourages you to play and level other classes.

3. I can grind for gear without help

Operations

1. There is a barrier from green to purple and purple to orange where you are taking on operations with a huge difficulty multiplier but are stuck with the lower level weapons. Once you get like 1 purple or 1 orange everything is much more manageable but failing 12 times in a row just to get your initial armory data feels especially unbalanced.

2. If you can clear an area and miss the armory you basically just get money for cosmetics. Not really much you can do so it tends to make the run feel hollow. I am a grinder so this doesn't bug me as much but my squad mates aren't as happy about it.

3. Other games like Verm2 have things like the Chaos wastes that help randomize the run helping it to feel different each time. This helps a lot for replayability.

4. Verm2 and other games in this genre also have secrets to find and puzzles to solve in each level giving the team something else to do other than kill things. SM2 doesn't give you any downtown at all so secret finding or puzzles probably wouldn't fit but these are the things that keeps the squad coming back for more night after night.

5. Lots of old folks like myself still play these games and we have to maximize our time when we play. We typically play for 3 hours at a time and if we can't make some sort of progress or feel like the challenge is fair people lose interest. We don't have time to game for 10 hours straight anymore. Games like this need to find a balance for all players not just hardcore players.

I'm general this game is incredible and has a lot of potential but the negatives have started outweighing the positives and everyone I know has quit because of that. I like this game a lot else I wouldn't be here (cause I rarely participate in community) posting pleas to fix the game. I WANT to keep playing but ATM I just can't keep throwing myself at a wall.

It would probably break the game but if they literally just let you say cash in 60greens for a single purple I would probably continue playing solo. I am a grinder but I can't beat substantial or anything above it with bots. And I haven't been successful beating those with random players who don't cohesively work as a team so really who was the game built for?